Atari Assembler Editor

Article summary

Atari Assembler Editor (sometimes written as Atari Assembler/Editor) is a ROM cartridge-based development system released by Atari, Inc. in 1981. It is used to edit, assemble, and debug 6502 programs for Atari 8-bit computers without the need for additional tools and even works without a disk drive or cassette drive (minus the ability to save programs). Assembler Editor was programmed by Kathleen O'Brien of Shepardson Microsystems, the company which wrote Atari BASIC. The Assembler Editor presents a programming environment similar to BASIC, with text-based commands and line numbered source code. Unlike Atari BASIC, programs are not parsed into tokens as each line is entered. Assembly times are slow, making the cartridge challenging to use for larger programs. In the manual, Atari recommends the Assembler Editor as a tool for writing subroutines to speed up Atari BASIC, which would be much smaller than full applications. The Atari Macro Assembler was offered as an alternative with better performance and more features, such as macros, but it is disk-based, copy-protected, and does not include an editor or debugger. Despite the suggestion, commercial software was written using the Assembler Editor, such as the games Eastern Front (1941), Caverns of Mars, Galahad and the Holy Grail, and Kid Grid.…

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